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| Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash |
Impressed that skills that should take years to acquire and hone were now within the easy grasp of so many, and apparently with so little effort. Perhaps technology had indeed been the manna that technologists had long claimed and always known to be.
I started thinking just what exactly prompts so many people to add new skills to their resume on LinkedIn. After all, it had to be a process more deliberate than random. What if the ingredients in this heady concoction were exaggeration, hope, aspiration, bravado, and plain envy?
In the end, I decided that these rules-of-thumb, that I list below, were likely the best explanation...
How to add skills on your resume:
- Put "Cloud Computing" on your resume if you know how to use Gmail.
- Put "SaaS" on your resume if you have heard of "Salesforce.com" or "AWS".
- Put "Mobile" on your resume if you own a smartphone, any smartphone.
- Put "mobile visionary" on your resume if you ever owned a smartphone that ran Android Froyo.
- Put "Social" on your resume if you know how to login to Facebook. No, Orkut doesn't count.
- Put "Big Data" on your resume if you own a hard drive one Terabyte or larger.
- Put "data scientist" on your resume if you can add two numbers using a calculator.
- Put "unstructured data" on your resume if you can use Twitter.
- Put "NoSQL" on your resume if you have never written a SQL statement in your life (inspired from this cartoon)
- Put "local" on your resume if you graduated from a school in the town you live in.
- Put "Data Visualizations" on your resume if you have heard of Edward Tufte. Add "Expert" if you have heard of Stephen Few.
- Put "spatial" on your resume if you have ever used directions in Google Maps.
- Put "product management" on your resume if you have ever sent an email to anyone with the title "product manager".
- Put "product evangelist" on your resume if you have hired a product manager.
- Put "strategy" on your resume if you've heard of Michael Porter.
- Put "disruptive innovator" in your resume if you have heard of Clayton Christensen.
- Put "strategic innovation" on your resume if you have heard of David Teece.
- Put "leadership" on your resume if you were ever within one mile of any business school.
- Add "cutting edge" to "leadership" if you have looked up Stanford University on Google Maps.
- Put "executive leadership" if you have sat for any class in any business school.
- Add "global distributed management" on your resume if you've attended a conference call where the attendees were from more than two countries.
- Put "vision and strategy" on your resume if you have ever attended any 'off-site'.
- Put "visionary" on your resume if you have ever installed or used a beta product.
And lastly.... - Put "bibliophile" on your resume if you have written at least one book review on Amazon.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
The second post in this trilogy is available here - The Six Plus One Types of Interviewers.
(this is a lightly-edited version of a post I wrote in 2013. This also appeared in LinkedIn in Aug, 215)
© 2017, Abhinav Agarwal (अà¤िनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.
